The West End is very well regarded for professional stage shows. Together with New York's Broadway, Westend entertainment is frequently considered to deliver many of the very best shows in the world. Seeing a West End production is exceptionally popular entertainment especially among visitors. Many stage shows and in particular hit musicals are staged in the great venues of London's Theatreland. Large numbers of people attend a West End theatre show each year. West End Theatre Breaks are also extremely common in the UK. Theatre Breaks are regularly booked as a short break luxury to celebrate a special occasion. A Westend show is the focal entertainment but booked together with a hotel and often restaurant reservations for a special meal.
The main theatre region of London consists of around forty venues and was renamed by Westminster Council and the Society of London Theatre as 'Theatreland'. It is located in the heart of the West End of Central London and is traditionally defined by Oxford Street to the North, The Strand to the South, Regent Street to the West and Kingsway to the East. Prominent theatre streets are Drury Lane, Shaftesbury Avenue and The Strand. Most of the works staged are musical theatre, classic plays and comedy performances.
The Westend theatre neighborhood started to be established with the opening of numerous small theatres about 1806. The development of the Westend entertainment region gained pace with the Theatres Act 1843 that relaxed the conditions for the performance of plays. In the following decades, countless new venues were opened. That development continued until the 1st world war. For the duration of the 50s and 60s, lots of plays were created in theatre clubs in order to dodge the censorship at that time exercised by the Lord Chamberlain's Office. However, the Theatres Act 1968 at long last abolished censorship of the stage in the UK.
Most of the theatres in the West end are of late Victorian or Edwardian construction and most are privately owned. The bulk of them have great character and the largest and best maintained include grand neo-classical, Romanesque or Victorian facades and luxurious detailed interior design and decoration. Then again, leg space is often cramped and audience amenities like bars and toilets are usually much smaller than in modern venues. The protected status of the buildings and their confined urban locations, together with financial constraints, make it awfully hard to make extensive enhancements to the furnishings, fixtures and fittings.
Some of the long running musicals performed in the West End have profitably played to audiences for many years. A few of the most well-liked musicals are We Will Rock You that is set in a future world where rock music is banned, Les Miserables which is an international award winning musical about an epic story of passion and destruction, Chicago is about a young woman who has killed her lover but is acquitted, The Lion King that is an adaptation of the Disney film, The Phantom of the Opera that tells the tale of the phantom that terrorises the Paris Opera, Billy Elliot which is the moving story of a boy who loves ballet, Dirty Dancing which is the stage version of the classic film, Sister Act is another adaptation of a hit movie, Mamma Mia is about a mother and daughter and three potential dads, and Stomp which is a fast paced combination of music, tap dance and percussion. The list is endless as there are so many West End stage productions to pick from. There really is a show that could appeal to everyone. Attending a theatre show in the Westend is truly rather special
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